I walked pigeon-toed as a toddler and wore corrective leg braces, day and night, for two years (ages 3-4). I remember the frustration of trying to fall asleep (and forget turning over) and even trying to get up with those things on… I also have fallen arches, mismatched feet (almost a half-size different), and slightly mismatched legs.
Unsurprisingly, when I was a kid my favorite “sports” were swimming and chess. 
I was pigeon toed as a kid. My dad believes to this day that it was caused by jelly sandals (remember those?). He took me to a podiatrist or something when I was six or seven and they had plastic inserts made for my feet. I had to wear them in my shoes all the time. By the time I grew out of them, my feet were pretty much okay. After years of ballet, my feet now turn outwards.
They’re still dead flat, though. The inserts didn’t help at all with that.
No need for the tractor beam: My best friend got me hooked by sending a link to one of Sampiro’s threads. No other coercion needed! (Of course, now I don’t know whether to blame Friend or Sampiro when I miss a deadline because I’m busy reading about people’s corrective shoes/insane relatives/favorite movies/whatever.)
I was born with huge fat pads on the bottoms of my feet, and tiny tiny femurs. The doctors told my mom I would never walk. When I was an infant and sat up, my baby belly fat covered my femurs completely, and it looked like my knees and hips were attached to each other.
I wore orthotics in my shoes for the first couple of years until the fat melted away and my arches were found to be low, but normal. I still have a fat pad, so my arches look fallen in wet footprints, but they’re not.
I still need to be careful what shoes I wear because my chronic sesmoiditis and plantar fasicitis act up if I wear hard soled shoes.
I have very high arches as a result of mild spina bifida. So when I learnt to walk my feet took the path of least resistance and I walked on the outside edges, so that my soles actually faced each other.
Not such a great thing.
My mother of course took me to an orthopaedic surgeon who wanted full leg casts, calipers, traction and og knows what else. Mum sought a second opinion, from another consultant (one about 30 years younger who specialised in paediatric cases) and all I ended up with were tiny grey plastic things that sat around my heels when I wore shoes, which I wore from the age of 2 til 5. I don’t think they were even visible to an observer, and I don’t remember any pain or discomfort.
I still have insanely high arches and wear down the outside of my heels (most of my shoes need re-heeled every 6 months) but at least I walk normally.
Wow, I had no idea that very flat feet were considered orthopedically severe. Mine are also very flat (full footprints!) and I regularly take very long walks and bike rides. They hurt a fair bit after a while but it doesn’t bother me that much.
This isn’t orthopedia, but kind of analogous: as a kid I developed amblyopia (lazy eye) so I had to wear patches over my right (dominant) eye so that my left eye would learn to see. Otherwise it could have gone blind despite being physically normal. Today, I see almost entirely out of my right eye when both are open (except for the far left of my visual field), but I still have normal vision in my left eye when I close my right.
I have widely spaced teeth, like my mother (who also contributed the upper left canine that never fell out and had to be extracted when I was in college). There was talk of braces, but it turned out that I had properly spaced but small teeth, so braces would have just crowded them into the front of my dental arcade. So we left well enough alone.
I used to have to wear the shoes with the bar as an infant, as well, and I’m fairly certain that my mother still has them in her hall closet somewhere in the back. I also have flat feet and had to wear special shoes with the cork “cookie” in the sole until I was in something like 8th grade.
it’s called a dennis-brown bar, and i also had one.
My mother mentioned that I had to wear special corrective shoes as a baby, but I don’t know any details.
I was really bowlegged as toddler, to the point that it looked difficult for me to walk (I say “look” because I have no memory of that period of my life beyond what I’ve seen in home movies and photos). I had to wear special shoes too. My legs are pretty straight now but sometimes I think I’m a little bandy-legged when I see my reflection in the mirror.
I called my parents today to check on the particulars… neither remembers the exact timeline, but apparently I had pigeon-toes and my feet rotated outward. I had casts up to just below my knees from when I was 6 or 7 months old until I was about a year – my dad says I started standing and perhaps walking in the casts. Then I got the special shoes, and I had the bar between them to wear at night. The shoes looked like I was wearing them on the wrong feet. I had that until I was almost 2 years old – and, man, I HATED that bar! That must be one of my first memories, because I distinctly remember hating that bar.
I’m no longer pigeon-toed, but my feet do still rotate out some – most of my shoes have the outside of the sole worn down much faster than the rest, and I’ll stand or rest on the outside of my feet – especially when I’m tired.
Hm, I’m doing that right now, as I’m typing – I’m wearing new shoes, and they’re a little uncomfortable since I’ve been wearing them all day. My foot bottoms are touching, and it feels perfectly normal to me.
I do have some knee problems, but we have no way of knowing if that’s because of the orthopedic gear or in spite of it, or if it’s completely unrelated. I do have a tendency to roll my ankle, sometimes quite badly. It’s kind of embarassing – it looks like I’ve tripped over nothing.
Dangit, how come I got the sucky genes and my brother got the good ones? I have bad eyesight, huge tonsils, bad knees and ankles, and I’m short and overweight (I know, the overweight isn’t entirely genetic, but if you look at my family…). My brother is tall and trim, is the only one in the family who doesn’t need corrective lenses, doesn’t have any health or joint issues, nothing! Oh, well – I did get the red hair. 
I TOTALLY do this all the time and I hate it. :mad: In fact I just did it a couple of days ago in my front yard. I was walking toward my garbage bin with a small trash bag in each hand. I stepped down onto a very slight depression in the yard that was masked by the grass and then THWUMP… I instantly collapsed in a heap like someone had yanked the ground out from under me.
Most of the time I don’t cause injury to my ankle, but a few months ago when I was in Vegas with my girlfriend, I “fell off” a 1" overlap of the sidewalk :dubious: into a heap in front of a McDonalds and sprained my ankle pretty bad. I blamed it on it being 3am and us having spent the night drinking and dancing at the dyke club on the Strip. But now that I think about it, and how commonly it happens to me for little or no reason, I’m certainly willing to consider my walking posture as the culprit.
It doesn’t seem to happen to me nearly as often when I’m running or playing sports and such, though. Maybe because I’m concentrating more on my footing when I run than when I walk?
Another pigeon toed kid checking in. I also had that hateful brace between my baby shoes, and wonder why my nose protrudes at all, as many times as I fell on my face. That didn’t fix things, and it wasn’t until an orthopedic doc realized that my right leg was shorter than the left that the problem was fixed. I had to wear special shoes with a lift in the heel, but thankfully, my adolescent growth spurt caused the legs to even out and the crappy special shoes are a thing of the past.
I wore those corrective shoes with a bar as a baby too. I recall my parents supporting me as I jumped on the bed with them on. But I also recall screaming into the darkness from my crib. 
I have mixed feelings about the therapy.
I had the shoes with the bar, too, but I don’t remember it at all. I only know about it because my mom kept it in the upstairs closet well into my adult years.
Welcome to SD.
Are you aware that you’re responding to a thread that is over 6 years old and almost all of the original posters are long gone?
Hello! Yes, I’m aware this is an old thread. I was doing research on the Dennis Brown Bar corrective shoes and came across these posts and found them helpful as I process my experience.
Maybe if somebody put corrective shoes on zombies, they wouldn’t shamble so badly.
(Second thought: Phew, I already posted here once, don’t have to tell the whole story again!)
I’m still here … what am I, chopped liver?
wanders away sniffling because she feels abandoned and ignored
Ah, another zombie where I think, “Hey! I should post in this thread!” until I notice that it’s several years old…and I already had anyway.